WilhelmJ's comments

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Cool Algorithm - Fast text search using BWT

As far as I can tell, author is talking about FM-Index. It compresses the search data into a much smaller index memory footprint. I tried using it few times, but never figured out how to use it as a key-value data store. If anybody is interested, here is the code: http://pizzachili.di.unipi.it/indexes/FM-indexV2/fmindexV2.t...

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anybody selling their side project?

I just want to clarify something here, I am not an idea guy or a business guy. I am a hacker but my specialties are systems programming in C/C++ and I am learning web dev on the side when I get time, but haven't gone that much far. The reason for this post was partially to motivate me as well, since its great motivator once you get something going.

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: A new way to consume the social web

Didn't understand how the sentiment analysis works, since results look quite not what I expected. I did a test search on 2012 presidential candidates:

Obama: 44% positive ("barack obama" is 62% though)

Mitt Romney: 67% positive

Michele Bachmann: 50% positive

Herman Cain: 71% positive (?)

Ron Paul: 71% positive

Rick Perry: 81% positive (??)

I am not sure the sentiment calculation is just based on Positive/Negative dictionary comparison or something else. Is there a logical explanation of above percentages? Do results vary for other people?

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: The real reason you can't hire developers....

I want to add something from my own experience.

One particular company I was interested in had few puzzles on their website. I once worked the whole weekend to solve them as good as I can. Spent lot of time writing a custom cover letter, resume and attached the C++ solutions to the puzzles.

Its been several months and I am still waiting for the damn reply!

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Learn Web Design, Web Development, and iOS Development - Treehouse

The site looks great and very user friendly, but as others have pointed out, the paid-tier-only seems too restrictive. Specially given the motto of treehouse is "Millions of people can't afford a quality technical education, or if they can, it's out of date immediately when they graduate. We aim to change that."

How can this compare to MIT (and other) Open Course Work and hundreds if not thousands of good free tutorials on the internet Vs $25/$49 a month?

FWIW, I learned basics of web development/design totally free, just took a bit of searching to find good resources, and once I was confortable with basics, the further education came through just googling-on-demand, videos only helped in the beginning.

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: The Deadly Microsoft Embrace

The article says that over the next 5 years, about 7 Million laptops will be purchased. The price of windows mentioned in the article is about $110 at current rates, which means $770 million order for MS. That definitely is a big order for MS, considering the full laptop is only expected to cost ~$300.

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Screwed out of $12.8 million. Being Extorted. No Money for attorneys.

Not sure if it'll add more credibility to the claim, but interestingly the wikipedia page for Anakam doesn't talk about Founders. And the company's official leadership page is empty!

http://anakam.equifax.com/Company/Leadership/

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: A man died yesterday. He had a huge impact on our lives. Fred Shuttlesworth.

On a slightly different note, I don't remember top 5 posts on HN all about deaths! I wonder why so many people upvote so many stories related to same subject (i.e. Steve Jobs' death)?

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: my weekend project - music discovery for karmawhores

Hi there,

You've done some nice work on the project. Since I follow most showHN posts, I think I am seeing this submission 4-5th time in last 1 and a half month with different titles. I tried to search for previous submissions but seems like they were taken down later.

Please don't get me wrong, I wish best of luck to this startup, but would you really still call it a 'weekend project'? I think not.

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Learn Vim Progressively

When I learned to use vim years ago, one interesting observation was that the biggest thing to learn in vim is efficient navigation.

i.e. if you know how to get to a particular logically defined place in the file, you will always be able to carry out copy-paste-delete to and from that place to where to cursor is.

One would be surprised how easy thing become once you know the basic navigation rules due to marvelous mix-n-match nature of vim operations.

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Dear procrastinator

There are tons of interesting books I bought, but I have kept on procrastinating reading, since I know that I can always read them later. That feeling IMHO - that I own something and can process it later - is major cause of procrastination for me.

same way my browser windows are a mess with 70+ tabs open. Most of them are only open because the content is too interesting to close and I am too lazy to read!

WilhelmJ | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Landing a job with a startup in the valley

This might help... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828161